Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Fair, Balanced, and to the Point

About this web log

This blog is intended as an objective and dispassionate source of information on the latest CAM research. Since my background is in pharmacy and allopathic medicine, I view all CAM as advancing through the development pipeline to eventually become integrated into mainstream medical practice. Some will succeed while others fail. But all are treated fairly here.

About the author

John Russo, Jr., PharmD, is president of The MedCom Resource, Inc. Previously, he was senior vice president of medical communications at www.Vicus.com, a complementary and alternative medicine website.

Common sense considerations

The material on this weblog is for informational purposes. It is not medical advice or counsel. Be smart, consult your health professional before using CAM.

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After that article appeared, the Swiss Association of Homeopathic Physicians published an open letter to the editor that was critical of the conclusions. This year, others have weighed in with their criticisms here and here, which focus on the lack of transparency in divulging the criteria used to select and evaluate the studies.

Its complicated and technical, and enough to make you go for a massage. However, I find that this recent article by 2 reviewers in Germany quickly cuts to the problem — the methods used to analyze the homeopathy studies probably lead to the erroneous, albeit comforting conclusions.

The studies selected for the review differed greatly.

Number of patients treated

Type of homeopathy used

Type of publication (some studies were unpublished)

Medical conditions treated

Overall, homeopathy showed a significant benefit compared to placebo.

But restricting the analysis to successively larger studies resulted in progressively less statistical significance for homeopathy.

Ultimately, negative conclusions from the analysis of the 8 largest homeopathy studies were influenced by 1 negative study of arnica to prevent muscle soreness in 400 long-distance runners.

The bottom line?
Were the authors lazy, unknowledgeable, or beset by bias?

Maybe, but it’s really not important. The failure here is with the journal in meeting its responsibility as gatekeeper for high-quality, peer-reviewed studies.

The Lancet is really more of a newspaper than a medical journal. Rapid publication is one of its attractive features for researchers. Considering the number of methodological deficiencies in the article, one wonders if the editors even bothered to have it peer reviewed.